Hi!
I have about 500 Amiga disks and I would like to convert a lot of them to ADF format, in order to use in WinUAE.

The way I see it, I have two options.

1) Use TSGui on a real Amiga to do the conversion to ADF. Then transfer the ADF from the Amiga to the PC witch a nullmodel cable.

2) Buy the Catweasel MK4+ and read the Amiga floppies on my PC and convert them to ADF.

Now I'm interested to know how good the Catweasel Card is? Will I be able to read most of the Amiga discs or will I still have some limitations?

Since the Catweasel card is quite expensive, what's your opinion about it. Is it worth the money or would a better solution be using the conversion on a real Amiga instead (i.e skip the Catweasel Card) ?

Use TSGui on a real Amiga to do the conversion to ADF. Then transfer the ADF from the Amiga to the PC witch a nullmodel cable.

Choose this option if you already have a real Amiga and no other floppy disks (e.g. 400K/800K Macintosh format) you wish to convert to images for use with emulation. TSGUI will produce ADFs from Amiga floppy disks and also write them back to disk later if required. Problematic disks will be imaged in extended-ADF (eADF) format (~2MB) - also compatible with WinUAE.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zed

Buy the Catweasel MK4+ and read the Amiga floppies on my PC and convert them to ADF.

Choose this option if you likely have no problematic (i.e. copy protected) disks, as the Catweasel card still has no support for this, or if you would prefer to mount Amiga floppy disks directly in WinUAE (support for this is still not complete, however, AFAIK).

The Catweasel MkIV is theoretically able to deal with any floppy disk format with the right drivers. Presently it is able to create images from a number of other floppy disk formats, besides the Amiga, and will write some of them back to disk. The lack of driver updates available is a constant annoyance to the buyers of these cards (myself included).

If you have two floppy disk drives connected to a non-USB FDC in your Windows 2000+ PC, you can use Toni Wilen's (free) adfread program and Simon Owen's (free) Fdrawcmd.sys driver to make ADF images of your Amiga floppy disks.

If you have a DOS boot disk and at least one FAT partition on your IBM compatible PC, you can use the (free) trial version of Vincent Joguin's Disk2FDI program to do the same thing.

If you only have one floppy drive and a parallel port in your PC, the more reliable Registered Disk2FDI program will, for €30, perform the same trick using a two-wire cable between your parallel port and floppy drive port. The Disk2FDI Registered version will, like the Catweasel card, also support a useful range of other disk formats, but will not write images back to disk.